Let’s just say stocks aren’t my thing

Hello and welcome back to my blog! I’m back to talk more about PGP. In PGP we left off learning about marketing ourselves. If you happened to miss that post I basically just talk about  what I’m planning to do for the rest of my life, which I honestly still am not sure about. But anyways, lets talk about finances. Throughout the finances part of this project we have been learning about budgets, what to save, and about stocks and investing in our own using a stock simulator. This all helped us answer the question “How do I support my career life choices?”. 

To start off the Financing aspect of this PGP project we started off with a checkpoint called Budgeting Reality. In this we made charts to budget our Fixed Expenses vs. Variable Expenses. For this activity we wrote out some of our fixed/variable expenses, what the budget was for that expense, and how much you were actually paying on that per month. For example a Fixed expense is something thats constant every time you pay it like a data plan. A Variable Expense is something that can vary every month like Groceries. 

Next we used the plans we made in the “Marketing” part of PGP to create budgeting for your financial future. This includes a summer job and how much your planning to save, and future planning like the cost of tuition, books, rent, etc. So lets just say life is expensive.

So now for the “Stock Market Challenge. So stocks…the interesting and very complicated world of investing in companies to hopefully make more in the long run. Well, to start this process off we needed to learn about stocks, figure out the ropes so that we could maybe succeed at this task. So we learned about the stock market terms. This included types of investments like bonds, funds, investment trusts, etc. As well as investment strategies like passive and active strategies, growth investing, value investing, income investing and more. But the key idea that we needed to decide was wether we were going to go into this stock similar aggressive meaning going all in and taking risks, or being conservative thinking with the slow and streaky wins the race mindset. This also meant choosing wether we wanted to invest ethically or not. So this brings the research part. This honestly was so confusing at first but I just started researching companies, the best companies to invest in, what are ethical companies to invest in, etc. So after a deep dive into the stock market world I decided on companies like Emphase Energy, Microsoft, Aflac Incorporated, Apple, Pepsi, and the Intuit Inc. I talk about all these companies in detail and a little bit about why I invested in them in my Week 1 Stock Market Reflection. But basically within a week of having multiple shares of these companies and selling and buying more my stocks were down, and long story short they have been down ever since. But along with with the first stock market reflection came a bunch more as we have been completing our stock simulators for around 5 weeks. Read more about my stock simulator experience down below ⬇️

Throughout the weeks we spent working with stocks we also completed some other activity’s that had to do with finances. One of these activity’s was another online quiz we did to learn about our personality type. Before completing this quiz we were given a chart to choose from the sections provided what we felt our personality was. Then we completed the test once for ourselves and once for a peer to see if the test results matched up when you weren’t doing it on yourself. I talk about this entire process in my reflection that you can read down below. 

Lastly came the spring exhibition, which if you have been reading my posts for a while you will know we have done a lot but I think this one turned out pretty cool. We merged this PGP project with our Podcasting Maker project to create business cards for our project. Our room theme was an office, so we created office cubicles, a front desk, many signs, and more. Since my podcast was about social media trends I was originally going to present my business cards under that section. However I ended up at the reception desk at the front doors explaining our projects to everyone who came by.

Overall I feel I learned a lot about different financing aspects that I didn’t pay much attention to before hand. The exhibition also turned out great and I’m really happy I got a chance to present the business cards I created and showcase all my work. As I have already posted my humanities and maker posts this is technically my last grade 10 project post. However stay turned because I still have my tPol post!